Ramblings

8/31/2016

Travel log, part 4: Rome

Dates of travel: Saturday, 3/26 to Tuesday, 3/29

Scenes like this are just about everywhere you look

General

Rome, although not my favorite city, was by far the coolest. There was loads of history everywhere you look, and so many photogenic things to see and do. And despite the apparent lack of an accessible public transit system, Rome is easy to get around because the historical part of the city has places of interest located in close proximity to each other. There weren't as many cheap traveling hostels as in other cities, so the only hotel I found around was Hotel Acropolis for around 50 € a night, which was conveniently close to the train station which links to the airport. On that note, a warning people should keep in mind is that the last train to the airport leaves before midnight, with the next one leaving at 6 AM. If you have an early morning flight, you'll have to take a taxi.

Places

Foro Romani

The Colosseum

The Vatican

Trevi Fountain

The Pantheon

Other things

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6/26/2016

Travel log, part 3: Paris

Dates of travel: Friday, 4/1 to Monday, 4/4

Paris from the top of the Eiffel Tower

General

My last destination in my spring break travel itinerary, Paris was a great place to visit, although it didn't entirely live up to my expectations. Regardless of that, I wouldn't take it off the bucket list yet.

When getting in from CDG, there is a cheap train ride into the city. As far as I know, there are several stops along the way which you can get off at, but I took the one that dropped me closest to the hostel I had found, Woodstock Hostel, which was probably the most unique place I have ever stayed at. It was hippie themed, with breakfast and wifi. I had the pleasure of rooming with an old Asian man, who traveled the world seeking spiritual guidance.

I had no idea how to navigate the public transit in the city, but my hostel was close enough to the action and the weather was temperate enough to allow me to walk everywhere. Either way, I didn't see much about public transit in the city, and Paris seems very navigable without it. The city itself is not the cleanest, nor does it feel the safest. Some street con artists similar to the ones I ran into in Rome will literally grab on to you and then try to start a fight when you push them away, and the old Asian man had his phone stolen over the course of my stay.

Places

Arc de Triomphe

The Louvre

Eiffel Tower

Cathedral de Notre Dame

Other things

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5/28/2016

Travel log, part 2: Barcelona

Dates of travel: Tuesday, 3/29 to Friday, 4/1

The beautiful beach on the east side of the city

General

My first and last impressions of Barcelona were both of a very clean and safe city, in contrast to Naples. This was my middle destination (out of 3) on my spring break vacation. When flying in, it is easiest to reach the middle of the city by getting a weekend metro card for fairly cheap and traveling from the airport stop. Be warned, however, that the wifi at the airport is extremely finicky, so ask around instead. The metro system in Barcelona seems to be very well laid out, maintained, and easy to navigate (complete with English stop announcements). After accidentally wandering to the business area where the tallest (and some very cool looking) buildings are, I mapped my way to a hostel called Dream Cube Hostel. It simultaneously the best and cheapest hostel I stayed at the whole semester. Very clean and new facilities for ~16 € a night, including a kitchen, fridge, and lockboxes. Most people (especially the staff) I spoke with spoke very decent English, and Spanish isn't too difficult to decipher. There is a convenient metro station nearby that will allow you to reach every major point of interest. When planning, it may be worth booking ahead of time: if my trip had been any later, I would have been SOL as there was a Real Madrid v. Barcelona.

Venturing into the city, you will find no shortage of places to eat and drink. Most sections of the city seemed pretty safe after nightfall.

Places

Park Guell

Sagrada Familia

Picasso Museum

Other things

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5/24/2016

Travel log, part 1: Naples

(And more importantly, Vesuvius and Pompeii)

This past semester, I studied abroad in Budapest, Hungary. Being in Europe, the land of cheapo airlines, enabled me to do a fair bit of traveling and with all of my flights and layovers and jet lag awaiting me on the return trip, I figured I might as well spend some time talking about the places I visited and the cool stuff I did there.

Dates of travel: Saturday, 5/21 to Tuesday, 5/24

Naples from Vesuvius

General

My trip to Naples was a last minute, spur of the moment trip that I booked two days ahead of time. I wanted to squeeze one last destination in to my study abroad experience but forgot to book anything. Surprisingly, a round trip ticket from BUD to NAP on WhizzAir was only ~$107. The luggage restrictions weren't a problem, as I have a small backpack that fits as a personal item but still easily carries a few days worth of worth of clothes. When my flight got in early Saturday, I did the usual: hop on GMaps and figure out how to get to the center of town. The central station is only about an hour's walk from the airport, so I set off. First thing to note, is that you should consider this place tropical. It was upwards of 80°f and sunny for all but Tuesday. Needless to say, I should have taken transport, but I didn't want to waste money on a taxi and the public transit is complete rubbish. To expand on this: compared to most other places I visited, there are absolutely no English instructions OR English speaking workers to assist. You're on your own. Another thing is that all the services are run by a private company, TrenItalia, and it's not immediately apparent that this company is, in fact, the subway/train system. They also didn't have a three day pass or any short term multi use pass that I could find in the ticket machine. I didn't even try my luck with the buses, but the trains were luckily enough to get me to the few places outside the city that I needed to go. As a warning, I noticed that the public transit directions on GMaps seemed to be incomplete or incorrect, so make sure to poke around on the city maps first.

Regardless, when I reached the central station I stole some wifi (free wifi is pretty rare here) and found Art Hostel, a cheap hostel about a 30 minute's walk away. I was fairly happy with this place. For €20 a night, they provide good rooming (with 5 other people) and bathroom facilities, free wifi, and breakfast. It isn't in the most convenient location, but it isn't too far removed either. One thing you'll notice in the city is the sheer amount of graffiti. I don't think I saw a SINGLE building without it. I'm not sure if this is a huge problem in Naples but it seems to just about match how unclean the streets and sidewalks were. I don't like to sound soft about things not looking great, but Naples was BY FAR the dirtiest city I visited and also happens to have the worst driving. Mopeds with entire families on them (parents, two kids, and a dog, all unhelmeted) constantly weave through traffic, and there doesn't seem to be a standard to yielding. There are continuous close calls on the narrow streets and pedestrians don't seem to even look when crossing. The worst part though is that there are absolutely no quiet drivers. They seem to have made a language out of honking and every situation seems to warrant it.

Places

National Archaeological Museum

Small chapel

Royal Palace

Other things

Vesuvius

If you come to Naples, you're gonna want to do this. The easiest way to get to the top of the active volcano is to take a bus called Vesuvio Express which will take you almost all the way to the top at which point you can walk ~15 minutes the rest of the way. You can get to it by going to the Central station and taking the Circumvesuvio (get it?) line to the Ercolano stop. (Note that Portico-Ercolano != Ercolano!!! If you got on Line 1 or Line 2, you made the wrong choice. I learned this the hard way.) The agency is on the left as you walk out. Total cost is €20 and the trip takes about 40 minutes each way. You'll have 90 minutes at the top to take as many pictures as you can before the bus leaves again. (If you miss it, tough luck). Needless to say, there are some incredible views at the top that make the journey completely worth it.

Pompeii

After descending from Vesuvius, you can continue on the Circumvesuvio line for a few more stops and reach Pompeii. The entrance to the ruins is less than 50 meters from the exit to the train stop. The line didn't seem to be too long, and I explored most, if not all of the ruins in around 5 hours. There are incredible views if you reach the vineyard section around sunset.

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1/12/16

Fading text on a DrawerLayout in Android

Some applications, (notably, past versions of Spotify) have a drawerlayout which has the toolbar sitting above the drawer itself, so apps have the ability to display separate titles for both drawer states. Now, having different titles for the different drawer states can be trivially achieved by setting them in the ActionBarDrawerToggle constructor:

toggle = new ActionBarDrawerToggle(this, mDrawerLayout, mToolbar, R.string.title1, R.string.title2){...
	@Override
	public void onDrawerSlide(View drawerView, float slideOffset) {
		super.onDrawerSlide(drawerView,slideOffset);
		if(slideOffset > .50 && !isDrawerOpen){
			toolbar.setTitle("Profile");
			isDrawerOpen = true;
		} else if(slideOffset <= .50 && isDrawerOpen) {
			toolbar.setTitle("BandInsider");
			isDrawerOpen = false;
		}
	}
};

The float parameter passed in to the onDrawerSlide method is a number from 0.00 to 1.00 which represents the percent that the drawer is extended. Here we change the title when the drawer is halfway open or closed. However, this ends up looking pretty ugly when animated:

Now here, a trick we can do is to change the opacity of the title so that it is transparent when the title changes. We can whip up a quick math function that takes in a variable x, and gives values of 255 when x is 0 and 1, and gives a value of 0 when x is 0.5 (halfway open/closed):

Of course, since we need a proper alpha value to set the title text color, we have to scale this function by 255:

toolbar.setTitleTextColor(Color.argb((int)(255*(2*(Math.abs(.5-slideOffset)))),255,255,255));

Here it is, implemented at the very end of our onDrawerSlide function:

As you can see, having the title be completely transparent when it changes text results in a much smoother animation. However, it still seems a little jarring when viewed at a fast speed. We can do better by constructing a parabolic curve instead of a linear one:

toolbar.setTitleTextColor(Color.argb((int)(255*(4*Math.pow(slideOffset-.5,2))),255,255,255));

Now the text animates very smoothly. If anyone can come up with something better, like a bell curve, drop me an email!

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10/4/15

The mess that is Android

Recently, thanks to my Android app development class, I've gotten into Android programming, and as a result, I've noticed how deeply flawed the platform is. Now, I am no stranger to Android. My first smartphone was a Droid 2, I have a Galaxy S 4 & Galaxy Tab 10.1, and I know my way around custom roms, rooting, bootloaders and the like. But to be honest, I hadn't actually used an Android phone in 4 years until about a month ago when I found that GS4. I booted it up, hoping to see that Android had improved, but alas, it had made no progress in 4 years. The same problems still plagued the platform:

Bloatware

This is the most infuriating problem to me. It's like phone makers are willing to deliberately sacrifice software quality in order to make some extra cash. This may make sense for low end, $0 on contract phones, but what about a $200 flagship smartphone? When I reset and updated the GS4, I ended up with over 50 preinstalled apps. 3 music apps, 2 video apps, 2 messaging apps, countless AT&T apps trying to sell extra services that nobody ever uses, among a dozen other apps which added absolutely nothing to the device. All of these were permanent and not removable to the average user. A few of them even spammed notifications daily. So much bloat fills up a phone and detracts from the user experience. iOS and even Windows Phone do not have this problem.

Vulnerabilities

Recently, two major vulnerabilities in Android surfaced: one allowing attackers to bypass user's lockscreens, and another in the media decoder, both affecting millions of devices. Software as complicated as an operating system is generally insecure, but most operating systems are updated continuously. In theory, Android is too, but millions of devices affected by these vulnerabilities will remain vulnerable due to the last problem:

Lack of Updates

Android 6.0 images are out! I have a *single* Android device that’s eligible (…out of 30?) https://t.co/rbaKQem9hl /via @b3ll

— Steve T-S (@stroughtonsmith) October 6, 2015

My Droid 2 got one official update, from 2.2 to 2.3. Keep in mind, this was a flagship, top of the line phone, and there was no excuse for Motorola to drop support so quickly. This fate happens to many phones, even recently. Motorola will end support for the Moto E, after 219 days, 1 update, and the promise of more. Many phone manufacturers seem to drop support for devices after a year or so, halfway through a standard phone contract. Contrast this to Apple, who recently made iOS 9 available on the iPhone 4s, a phone that launched 4 years ago, on the same day that everyone else got it. This problem makes Android a nightmare for developers, as we have to target year-old API levels in order to capture compatibility with a reasonable number of devices.

These issues in Android seriously need to be addressed in order for it to compete long term with iOS. Google could easily leverage carriers and manufacturers to fix these flaws, which leaves me to question why they haven't yet.